With the first issue being a total disaster, the smart thing to do would have been to close shop and cut my losses. But I believed in Colt and felt there was an audience out there for the armadillo cowboy. Without my partner, Dave, I had to find someone else to help me with the comic book. I knew I was in over my head and needed someone with some business experience. I turned to my Uncle Ron, who had run a fairly successful computer business. He brought in some business savvy, experience and some much needed cash. But there was still not enough money to publish the next issue. So I did something that would later come back to haunt me. I sold off my 80,000+ sports card collection to a private dealer for $1,500.00. Little did I know that less than ten years later that collection would be worth ten times that much. Live and learn.
We did have some advantages over the first issue. First off, we knew the costs of making a comic book. We also knew how much to charge distributors. But we still had the problem of how to get people interested in the comic book. For this, I took a two step approach. The first was to lower the cover price. The first issue sold for $1.50. The problem was it really didn't sell. With only 800 of the 10,000 print run sold, I figured a lower cover price would build interest. In hindsight, it was probably a bad move on my part. If I had kept the cover price the same and if the sales would have done as well, we would have had enough money built up to easily publish a few more issues. But it was more important at the time to get people to read the comic than make a large profit.
The second thing we did to boost interest was create a limited edition. Remember, this was back in 1986, years before Image and Valiant made this popular. This was one area where we were ahead of our times. Figuring that we only sold 800 copies of the first issue, I decided to have a limited first edition of 3,000 copies. These would feature the Peter Laird sketch of Colt with Leonardo of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. All the other copies would feature a sketch of Colt with Fred Hembeck. I figured 3,000 copies was nearly four times the amount that we sold the first time, so it should be enough. I was sorely mistaken. Within days of sending letters to the distributors, I received a call from Diamond Comics, who wanted to purchase the entire first print. I had to decline and told them I needed to save some copies for other distributors, especially Capital City, the only distributor to carry the first issue. By the time it was all said and done, we sold 14,000 copies of Colt #2. It was a hit! Even better was that we redistributed the first issue and end up selling nearly 8,000 copies of those as well. So we went from being broke, to having money.
But the good times would not last. While Colt #2 did well, Ryan Brown was leaving us to work for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. And little did we know that Dan Berger was going to follow him. Soon, I was going to be the only person left from the original issue left. But for the moment, things looked bright. What was even more exciting was that the price of Colt #1 and especially the limited edition #2 were soaring in price. The second issue with the Ninja Turtle sketch reached a high of $35.00, while the first issue was selling for a high of $20.00.
Besides Leonardo the ninja turtle, there were other guest stars in Colt #2. First off, it featured the Kielbasa Kid, who was a character used in sketches on the Big Chuck and Little John show. This was a local show that featured two hosts that showed monster movies and had sketches during the breaks. The show still runs to this day and has the record as the longest running show of its kind. This came from an interview that Big Chuck did on another show he appeared on called North Coast Magazine. After the first issue, he interviewed Dan and myself for the show and as appreciation, we did a story with Big Chuck and Little John in it (Little John is the shopkeeper). Dan would end up being on their show as a result of this. Also, if you look at the bandits, there is one with long black hair. That bandit is Ryan Brown, the cover artist and at the time a good friend of Dan. Then on the page where Colt gets "hexed" there are numerous famous comic characters including Jon Sable, the Incredible Hulk, Cerebus, Zero from the first issue of Colt, Groo the Wanderer and Opus the Penguin from Bloom County.